...When It's DONE

This editorial discusses why complacency in regards to day 1 patches and the push to go 'digital-only' is harmful for video game preservation, and sets a dangerous precedent for the future of quality control.
(Battlefield 4, Dev, EA, Industry, Next-Gen, Retro, Tech)

Very worthwhile expose. Unfortunately, it won't do any good. We'll keep buying broken games which get patched later.

However, newer console patches (at least on the X360) can be backed up. It used to be that patches went into the volatile cache, and could disappear after a while, requiring a new download. But eventually that awful system was ditched in favor of patch files that can be seen in their respective game directories. Those can always be copied to PC and archived along with the games. I know Skyrim was patched this way for a fact, and I did archive several iterations of its patches, fearing that newer ones would be worse. (I trust Bethesda's programming not one bit.)

I think the trend is going to more polishing before release. In my opinion, that is why a lot of games get delayed lately.

We had this habit of early and broken releases now for a long while. I assume their statistics will show by now that they lost a lot of trust and therefor loosing more and more money from people, who got burned. I am often holding back my purchases, waiting for a better product and a better price. That's also what alot of fellow gamers, I know personally, do.

Only games I buy without hesitation and for full price are Nintendo games. Allways quality.

On the short run you may make more profit with a early, but broken release and lot of patching. But in the long run (5-10 years) you loose trust and money. (Looking at you EA.) You earn customer loyality only with quality imo.